When politics plays out through public health

By Dennis Archambault

The world saw an image of Americans on Memorial Day Weekend – and it wasn’t memorializing the country’s fallen military service members, or the nearly 100,000 people who died during the coronavirus pandemic. It was a scene of a hundred or more people jammed into a pool – unmasked, and certainly not observing physical distance. This was how BBC readers – and likely broadcast viewers – saw America’s adherence to public health orders and recommendations.

In what a local North Carolina news publication calls “Ace Speedway’s own ‘We the People’ moment,” a capacity crowd of 4,000 jammed the bleachers to watch an auto race. There was no evidence of face masks, despite extreme close contact between fans and cheering.

Back home in Michigan, Shawn Windsor, a Detroit Free Press reporter, drove through Metro Detroit and into rural communities to gauge compliance with masking and physical distancing. His account (https://www.freep.com/story/sports/columnists/shawn-windsor/2020/05/25/michigan-coronavirus-masks-stay-home-order/5250375002/) concluded that in Southeastern Michigan residents were observing the mask and social distancing required by executive order, but outside of the region, the practice diminishes.

People opposed to masking will cast doubt at its usefulness, claiming that it does little more than provide a false sense of personal security. But those who oppose quickly move into arguments of civil liberties. A more ominous perspective emerging is that wearing the mask may be a symbol of weakness and is a statement of political principle. With Gov. Whitmer, a Democrat, ordering the mask, and President Trump, a Republican, denying its relevance in a recent visit to a Ford ventilator assembly site – it becomes a political statement.

The Free Press article notes, “politics remain the starkest dividing line. Polls show those who lean conservative are less likely to wear masks. This may help explain why I saw only a handful of mask-free customers at a Walmart in Taylor and dozens and dozens of mask-free customers at the Walmart in Howell.”

Why Americans are so stubbornly resistant to authority and fiercely defensive of what they perceive to be freedom may be in our cultural DNA, but when it becomes malicious and political, it poses an incredible obstacle for public health communication to overcome.

Perhaps it’s comforting that the Republican governor of North Dakota, a state that has few examples of dense population centers, argues that “This is a … senseless dividing line and I would ask people to try to dial up your empathy and your understanding.” He went on to appeal to the better side of them: “If someone is wearing a mask, they’re not doing it to represent what political party they’re in or what candidates they support. They might be doing it because they’ve got a 5-year-old child who’s been going through cancer treatments. They might have vulnerable adults in their life, who currently have COVID and they’re fighting.”

Masks have been a symbol of many things. It is difficult for American culture to peer above the mask line to read the eyes of the strangers we confront. But in this case, the mask is a symbol of the deep, and deadly political divide in our country.

Dennis Archambault is vice president of Public Affairs for Authority Health